Tales from the ass festival: the agony & the ecstasy

On one day each year, Coorg’s Kuruba people converge in an ageless place to perform an ancient ceremony of binge drinking and screaming obscenities. For members of this Scheduled Tribe, does the Kunde Habba exist as escapism, elegy or enablement?

Coorg’s Kuruba people converge in one place to perform an ancient ceremony of binge drinking and screaming obscenities

We’d been told to expect delays en route to the ancestral tree where the sacrifices would take place. Not by any traffic, but by marauding gangs of boozed-up tribals wielding spears and sticks, shouting and chanting obscenities, blocking roads and demanding tribute.

Some had cautioned the trip might be dangerous, others suggested abandoning the thing altogether for the sake of not being mobbed and killed, but the little information available was all too alluring: a couple thousand tribal men, converged from the corners of southern Coorg, surging around an ancient, animist totem, drunk off their nuts on cheap arrack, dressed in women’s clothing. After which would commence the mass slaughter of chickens.

On the morning of the last Thursday in May, this is what we knew of the Kunde Habba, which translates into English, tidily, as the Ass Festival. “But what kind of ass?” I demand. “Is it like worshipping a physical ass? Is it about getting some sweet village lady ass? Calling out the Great Unmeaning for acting like an ass? What’s the story here?”

Karun Kumbera, 45, a Bengaluru-based architect originally from nearby Ammathi, shakes his head. He may have been born within this 4,000 sqkm district of verdant, fertile hills in the southwest corner of Karnataka, but despite his regular visits since leaving the region as a child, he’s never heard of the Ass Festival either. As a member of the Kodava clan that’s dominated the Coorg region for centuries, he feels a bit bashful about it, and has therefore agreed to wingman the mission.

Even before our van exits the electrified gates of our lodgings at the Apputa Coffee Estate, we’re halted by a few four-foot-nothing characters materialized from the foliage, all very swervy for this time of morning. One guy in a clingy, faded salwar is beating a cheap plastic drum with a blackened chicken bone, another’s wearing a Hallowe’en skeleton mask, leading a chant with “Kunde, Kunde! (Ass! Ass!)” while a smiley, yelpy man with facial features you’d expect to see in Papua New Guinea slurs back a lilty verse. Then he gets down low, dancing like he’s falling off the back of a pony. Or like he’s about to peel off his lady dress and show Hallowe’en Mask here what a real ass festival is about.

The Kuruba converge at their ancestral tree

Karun gets out of the van, his 6’2” frame towering over these morning drunkards, and learns they’re from the Kuruba tribe, hunter-gatherers indigenous to this hilly greenbelt of southern India. After a series of laws beginning in the early Sixties effectively made the Kuruba trespassers on their own ancestral land, their numbers have reportedly halved to just over 30,000, now mostly labouring on the coffee plantations that have made Coorg, especially the Kodavas, rich.

What little information we could find described the Kunde Habba as an annual gathering of tribals to ceremonially “abuse their gods”, which under modern circumstance had transmuted into workers cruising the coffee estates in costume, verbally abusing their bosses. Who wouldn’t enjoy getting drunk and doing that?

“Every year they go around the estates collecting money,” explains Karun, as the extortionate trick-or-treaters sozzle down to the main road, one of Karun’s ten-rupee notes in hand. They will continue their wobbly pilgrimage to a sacred ground at Devarapura, several kilometres away – or at least that’s the plan. Smiley sex-dance guy doesn’t look like he’ll make it past lunchtime. “And what were they chanting there?” I ask. “Does kunde really mean ass?” “It does,” confirms Karun, bending his beanstalk frame back into the van. “I couldn’t understand every word from their dialect, but the chanting was all about making out with a girl…” He pauses, I raise my eyebrows, and Karun leans in: “Everything he said was about the genitals.”

Thus, Karun’s day of translating the freeform verse of the Ass Festival begins – with an attempt at modesty. But it doesn’t last long. It can’t. Not once we pull into the next village, coralled by a troupe of young, sinewy bodies painted all-over silver, sporting wigs of palm fronds and cassette tape, a couple of jackfruit helmets for variety, harassing shopkeeps and passers-by, chanting “Ass, ass! A dick up your ass! Ass, Ass! A dick up your ass!”

Or when another surly toll collector a few more towns in – an unshaven androgyne in a sari and a blonde bouffant wig – thrusts his bony loins at the van, shouting: “Kunde kunde!Fuck it, fuck it! Kunde, kunde! Shake it, let’s fuck!”

And so it goes, us paying our way to the temple ten rupees at a time, snaking through sloping plantations of coffee country, where every so often there’s a stray man, fallen behind his procession, quavering like the losing fighter in Mortal Kombat. “Wow. Check that guy out,” says Karun, pointing at a man in a pair of tighty-whities and a halter top, struggling to keep pace with the uncontrollable weight of his head. “I don’t think he’s going to make it.” It is 11:23am.

Past a few more chains of human speedbreakers, we hit the last podunk roundabout before the sharp left leading to the Devarapura temple, where Karun’s been told all the tribals must reach by 3pm, when “something” auspicious will occur.

Here march our first pods of pre-noon pissheads that’ve really put in the effort: The fake boobs are sumptuous and round, bras stuffed with mangoes and apples, and one crafty gentleman has his emergency juicebox of arrack lodged in his cleavage.

But little could we anticipate that with a mere turn to the right, there would be no time to prepare, no time to contemplate, no time to fathom a true singularity of nature.

Kunde Habba is an annual gathering of tribals to ceremonially “abuse their gods”

Behold: It is The Drunkest Man In The World.

Haloed in a floppy-brimmed sunhat, clad only in boxer briefs with a girly fringe home-sewn around the waist, he’s tottering heavily, barking like Chewbacca with laryngitis. His pupils are rolled back, and then he’s back-first into the grille of a lorry that’s been kind enough to stop instead of splatter him. Our man turns to assess what has broken his fall, and there is a moment of frozen revelation, like Saul of Tarsus overcome by an epileptic holy light, after which comes the fit of a broken wind-up toy, then a fall into a hooch-coma on the side of the road.

Karun comes back from the shops with a couple bottles of water, much needed after our own plumbing of Johnnie Walker’s deep red hole last night, and he stops to bask in all that is The Drunkest Man In The World.

“Wow,” says Karun. “He’s not going to make it.”

The Kurubas have a problem with alcohol,” says Nanda Mukatira, 55, a fifth-generation Kodava landowner, lounging the previous night on his whitewash-pillared verandah, wringing out our first bottle of whisky and opening another.

They call Coorg the Scotland of India, but I suspect neither the cool, wet climate nor the inborn love of field hockey has much to do with it.

“Nanda kept nudging my leg if he thought I wasn’t keeping up,” Karun will later recall, chuckling at his old family friend. Karun still considers Coorg home turf, despite his father liquidating the family’s agricultural land, just south of the Apputa estate where we’re staying, in 1996. “I wanted to study architecture and urbanism,” he’d said with a shrug. “What was I going to do with a coffee plantation?”

The Coorg of Karun’s childhood is a land of enchanted groves, haunted bridges and roving spirits; a place where no one builds a house along the lines a necromancer determines is a path where ancestors take their nightly strolls, an alternate road-network for departed souls.

“You can always identify a ghost because their feet will be on backwards,” explains Karun with a wink.

Before the British brought their magic beans to these hills in the 18th century, agriculturalists would tend mainly to rice paddies. But once most cultivatable land in Coorg was converted to grow coffee, coffee was where the money came from. To you: Coorg is where your Starbucks comes from. Karun describes Nanda, a slight but solid man as “one of the golf-club Kodavas”, part of the business class that contributed greatly to India’s coffee exports, which topped $818 million last year.

“Coorgs [Kodavas] only care about three things,” declares Nanda, leading us in one of, well, a fair few verandah toasts, “Coffee, hockey and drinking.”

Nanda’s great-grandfather, awarded the title of Rao Bahadur – the Raj equivalent of an Order of the British Empire – headed the Mukatira clan as they transitioned from growing rice to the far more profitable caffeinate crop. As the family grew in size and stature, Nanda’s grandfather built another home nearby, and as that family grew, more homes sprang up, including Nanda’s verandahed manse.

Johnnie Walker reddening our cheeks, Karun listens as Nanda explains how the Kunde Habba “used to go from early morning to sunset, but these past few years they’ve been starting earlier and earlier.” He figures the Kurubas have been on the gargle since earlier today, and “they’ll drink all night.”

The Kuruba tribe are the hunter-gatherers indigenous to this hilly greenbelt of southern India

And so will we. And we’ll have to be poured into bed later too, but there’s still a palpable vibe of Us and Them. Even mentioning that Nanda’s daughter might consort with a Kuruba is met with a visible twitch. And Nanda can see that my next, obvious question is being muted by a guest’s attempt at good manners.

“I’m not saying inter-marriage could never happen,” says Nanda. “I’m just saying it’s not done.”

The Kodava tolerate the Kuruba’s annual day of debauch – far preferable to a pitchforked peasants’ revolt, no doubt – but Nanda’s implication is that these people, “genetically different” with their “dark skin, wide noses and wiry hair,” are starting to push their luck.

That the genetics of Indian tribes like the Kuruba can be traced to Africa, as can those indigenous to the Andaman Islands, is not a new idea, and there have been relatively conclusive DNA swabs to back this up. Where the casual racism comes in is with stories that say the Kurubas were African slaves brought here by the British to toil on the estates anyway, which makes for an easy absolution, a sense of superiority, and a convenient dehumanization. Which is not necessarily limited to the tribals. The less said about certain Kodava views on Muslims the better.

The Kodavas, after all, are a proud martial race who rebelled against Coorg’s 18th century Musloccupations by Hyder Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan, the biggest pain in the East India Company’s South Indian ass. Despite their small numbers – 70,000 in the region at latest count – Kodava-dominated Coorg remained an independent state on the Indian map until 1950, the same year Scheduled Tribes like the Kuruba were constitutionally granted equality rights and protections. But because of the forest protection acts in the Sixties, as well as national park and wildlife acts in the Seventies, many tribals have been forced off their lands, out of their culture and onto the estates.

Thanks to companies like Tata setting up operations here, workers’ wages have been normalized to well above what’s paid on other plantations from Kerala to Andhra, but if you give a Kuruba ten rupees, says Nanda, “he’s going to go piss it up. If you give him 100 rupees, he’s going to go piss it up.”

“They have a four-day week,” says Karun, “because on Sunday they get so sloshed they don’t turn up on Monday.”

Yet with persistent workforce shortages over recent years, Kodavas like Nanda need the Kurubas and their “small, muscular frames”, their “jungle” instincts that propel them up the trunks of the silver oak trees to clip the canopy into the right balance of light and shade that coffee plants need to thrive. There’s a story that one time, one of Nanda’s guys showed up too drunk to work and Nanda gave him a tight slap, a couple pills and told him to go sleep it off and come back. He couldn’t afford to fire him.

“Nanda, all these guys, they’re babysitting,” Karun tells me the next day. “The Kurubas don’t have ambition, they are happy where they are.” And the Chinese can’t drive. And black people steal. Indians smell like curry.

“These Kurubas are dwindling because they can’t figure things out in today’s reality,” says Nanda, and he’s right: they’ve never had a chance to experience a reality other than Coorg’s self-perpetuating bubble fief, let alone any feasible alternative to chronic, atavistic alcoholism.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, inebriates of all ages: Welcome to the Kunde Habba. It’s almost 3pm, and over the last couple of hours, all available tramping, stamping, dancing-in-trance space at the Devarapura temple grounds has been filled with over a thousand DIY-costumed men, all seething around the ancestral tree. It’s a tight-packed coalition of several loose affiliates, united under heraldries as diverse as an ant’s nest speared on the end of a forked stick, a Kingfisher Strong bottle with a daisy in it, and a three-foot blonde doll, held aloft with dress up, panties down, revellers reaching out to grab-ass this plastic caucasian child. “Kunde, kunde! Ass, ass! Fuck that ass, fuck that ass!”

Kunde Habba, which translates into English, as the Ass Festival

Around the tree they go, about half a football pitch’s worth of people spread to the rising hills on the north and west sides. The entire east side is the barrier of a Hindu temple, where a row of ladies in fine saris with oiled hair tied back, smelling of jasmine and higher class, have gathered comfortably on the sanctuary side of the wrought bars, like society ladies, fanning themselves, waiting for the Kentucky Derby to begin. Back outside, Three friends are so hammered they can only stay up by leaning on each other; only as a six-legged he-beast is forward locomotion possible, but they soldier on, as the ladies watch. Karun figures the tree was “an ancient animist temple that became a holy place, where people then built shrines to different gods,” so we won’t get much clarity about that, any more than why this little dude is squatting beside me, squawking and poking at my balls, falling into James Brownworthy splits and then just falling over. The temple rep was no help in getting us into the historical cracks of the Ass Festival either. He kept telling us to come back in 15 minutes, every 15 minutes, for two hours. Instead, we gathered an oral history of spiritual creole. One elderly gentleman, sitting on the grounds’ southern barrier wall in a pressed blue kurta and Nehru vest, explained, in Kannada, that the worshippers dress like women because “there is a woman god inside [the temple], Badrakali, so they think she likes woman things.”

That, or getting langered and prancing about in women’s clothing is simply always a great time. The collated narrative from various attendees, some who’d come from as far as Mangalore, expands on the basics of what we’d known coming in: that the male god Aiyappa was out on a hunt with the tribesmen, then he saw Badrakali in the forest, thought she had a nice ripe kunde, and abandoned the hunters to pursue his own lust. So every year, the Kuruba come here to cuss him out. And yet the most common utterance from Kunde participants doesn’t refer to any history or mythology – nor are we regaled with tales of exploitation, servitude or indentured labour – but a simple axiom: “It’s only Kunde for one day.”

The big auspicious “something” at 3pm is two turbanned men prancing in horse costumes representing Aiyappa and Badrakali, accompanied by a shaman in a trance, cackling and screaming like he’s in the throes of passing a gallstone the size of a mango pit. By now the surrounding hillsides are packed tight with hundreds of spectators, a few ice cream trucks and clumps of carnival balloons dotting the crowds.

And now, all hens must die. Helpless birds are tossed above the crowd like wedding bouquets; wedding bouquets that sometimes break apart when two people think they’ve grabbed first and start pulling. Little old ladies short-step by with live chickens in their woven handbags, on their way to the sacrificial ground behind the temple, where, I’m told, I’m not welcome.

Amid the bloody feathers on the ground, one of the few supervising cops looks to be transacting around a bird he’s weighing in his fist, maybe for purchase, maybe for baksheesh, which distracts me from a worshipper who’s peeled off from the roil and come over, bending down to touch Karun’s feet.

The man works on Nanda’s cousin’s estate, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know who Karun is, a well-connected Kodava, and even at that degree of separation, even today, the hierarchy must be maintained. Nanda later calls us to see if we survived, and when Karun tells him about the incident, Nanda says that’s one reason he can’t attend the Kunde. He’s enough of a bigshot that his mere presence would tilt the whole thing off its whorl, you see. Or he’s afraid he’d get ripped apart like one of these expiatory dirtybirds.

If the worker hadn’t snapped us out of our Kunde trance, we might not have spotted the unassuming, elderly couple, most definitely tribal, dressed in simple, traditional gowns, dancing a ways away from the collective tension of the swirling herd. The moves are unmistakably sexual, but instead of taking someone roughly up the dumper, this guy’s more suave, implying with a hip swivel and a smile, “Hey girl, we’ve got compatible body parts, let’s get some drinks and take a nice cool dip in the gene pool.”

Ding. The Kunde must have begun as a fertility festival, perhaps the various tribes coming together to, you know, keep the soil of the family trees nutrient-rich, keep the crops rotated, and have a good time doing it. Why would it have to be more complicated than that? Thousands of years ago, mating rituals were as essential as they are today, always helped along with a jar or twelve, and everyone, everywhere, needs a bit of ass every once in a while.

And in this quiet revelation, a harbinger of greater truths, truths found out in the headland of the mind, where beauty, sadness, love and chaos co-exist, as they only can, in that enlightened state of extreme inebriation:

I don’t know how he’s made it. I have no idea who or what divine force has led him to this last station on his Via Dolorosa. He staggers left, right, back; stops, calibrates, and howls out all of humanity’s sufferings past, right back to the time before there were coffee plantations, a time before there were gods. Then he fumbles, falling over as if his feet were on backwards.

But he’s soon risen again, eyes turned ever-inward, a man, alone, just for one day, on the edge of ecstasy.